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The Natural Hazards Center is pleased to introduce Angela Frederick and Kate Thorstad as the recipients of the 2025 Disability and Disasters Award. Their dedication to reducing harm and highlighting the strength and agency of people with disabilities during disasters impressed the selection committee. We’re excited to welcome them to the 2025 Natural Hazards Workshop!

Angela Frederick is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of Texas at El Paso. She has dedicated much of her career to the sociology of disability, but her interest in disasters and extreme weather piqued as she witnessed her friends and acquaintances in the disabled community experience major disasters—a tornado in Louisiana, Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and Winter Storm Uri in 2021.

Frederick—who is embedded in the Texas disability community and is blind herself—recognized Winter Storm Uri as a turning point in her scholarship.

“I was just simply overwhelmed by the number of stories from people I know that endured this crisis,” she said. “That was really the moment when I realized nobody else is going to tell this story.”

Her forthcoming book Disabled Power: A Storm, A Grid, and Embodied Harm in the Age of Disaster, available in December 2025, captures some those stories, which Frederick collected through dozens of interviews with disabled Texans and their caregivers.

Frederick encountered stories of care and reciprocity within the disabled community, like that of a blind woman who opened her home as a mini warming shelter, or a deaf couple who mobilized to deliver water and check up on elders.

“We don't know how to recognize the resilience and the agency of disabled people. We have these tropes, right? ‘Disabled are victims,’” Frederick said. “But I also don't want the innovation and the agency of disabled people to be missed in in these stories. They were thinking ahead. They were strategizing.”

Frederick hopes that drawing attention to stories like this will create a more nuanced understanding of the social vulnerability of the disability community, and she hopes that all researchers in hazards and disaster studies can work to develop a more complete understanding of disability in their work.

“My great hope for our future, in terms of research, is that we incorporate disability analysis into our research, just as we do other dimensions of inequality like gender, like race, like social class.”

While attending the 2025 Natural Hazards Workshop as part of this award, Frederick hopes to find future collaborators, especially emergency management practitioners, who are interested in disaster and disability research.

Kate Thorstad is a lawyer and legal scholar based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She began her career as a public defender in 2019, but stepped away after a few years due to debilitating migraines. Then Hurricane Ida hit the city.

“Because I was unemployed at the time, I just poured myself into recovery work,” Thorstad said.

Through that work, she found a fellowship with Disability Rights Louisiana, where she represented indigent survivors with disabilities on disaster-related legal issues.

“And I got hooked,” she said. “Disability law is a really underutilized and uniquely powerful tool at a time when other anti-discrimination laws are being rolled back.”

Now, as a staff attorney at Disability Law United, Thorstad is working on leveraging disability law to create stronger policies for climate mitigation and disaster preparedness and response.

Thorstad says working at the intersection of disability and disaster in New Orleans is especially meaningful as the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches.

“The death toll in the disability community during Katrina was catastrophic. Major changes have been made, but we've seen again and again in disasters that have occurred since that the disability community is still just being left behind,” Thorstad acknowledged. “And any disaster, environmental, climate justice policy that doesn't include the disability community is incomplete and will inevitably be ineffective.”

As part of the Disability and Disasters Award, Frederick and Thorstad will receive registration, meals, and travel expenses to attend the 50th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop. You can learn more about the award, which was made possible by a generous donation from a member of the hazards and disaster community, here. You can donate to this award or other Center activities via our giving page.